On the official Day in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, up to fifty people gathered outside Severodvinsk to commemorate those who worked and died in the Yagrinlag camp complex, building what is now the second largest city in the Arkhangelsk Region. Among those attending were relatives of the deceased prisoners and local historians, … Continue reading Victims remembered
Remembrance
monuments, events, publications
Sandarmokh, 5 August 2021
Today an extraordinary resource, "Russia's Necropolis of Terror and the Gulag", compiled by Petersburg Memorial's Research & Information Centre (and released in 2016), has been launched in an English version. What follows is an excerpt from that website's account of Sandarmokh. ============ [...] Historians believe that a considerable proportion of those executed in Karelia were … Continue reading Sandarmokh, 5 August 2021
First Discoveries, 1988-1991
The first time Yury DMITRIEV came across the unmarked remains of those shot during the Great Terror was in 1988, as he describes in My Path to Golgotha (pt 2). The immediate reaction since the 1950s was to cover up these bones and skulls with their tell-tale bullet holes. Now activists and relatives of those … Continue reading First Discoveries, 1988-1991
Remembrance (3): Four brothers
Alexander Pokrovsky and his three brothers were born in a village in what today is Russia's Oryol Region. By the early 1930s, they had moved to Moscow. Ivan (1904-1933), Simeon (b. 1911), and Sergei (b. 1915) There in summer 1932 the OGPU (predecessor of the NKVD) arrested them and by October that year all four … Continue reading Remembrance (3): Four brothers
Remembrance (1): Lists and Names
Faced by the grim and relentless persecution of Yury DMITRIEV over the last four years, it’s easy to lose sight of the achievements of the past quarter century, those countless acts of remembrance across Russia and former Soviet states that make any simple return to the past unthinkable. Yury Dmitriev resumes work, 2018 During the … Continue reading Remembrance (1): Lists and Names
The Dmitriev Affair 